Wells Fargo is working to streamline the commercial onboarding process as it embarks on a pilot designed to reduce the number of touchpoints between customers and employees.

Allysun Fleming, senior vice president of treasury management and payment solutions, is heading up the mission at the $1.96 trillion bank, having recently expanded her role in December to oversee commercial banking onboarding. Fleming has two near-term priorities across commercial and treasury onboarding, both of which push on-demand and self-service technology.

“Whereas before, customers wouldn’t choose a provider on who could be the fastest and easiest to partner with, we know now that it’s an important consideration,” Fleming said. “Our customers are telling us that they really would like us to get to a point where they never wait on us, we’re only on their timeline. We have a long way to go as an industry to get there,” she added.

On the commercial onboarding side, Wells Fargo is piloting a new model to reduce employee handoff. Rather than have several different individuals interact with the customer, the San Francisco-based bank is rethinking its workflow to coordinate fewer touchpoints with the customer, Fleming said. “We’re looking at who’s in the best position to quarterback, and we’re using that to drive every decision, and every time we have a touchpoint in our model, we’re challenging ourselves with that question, and using that to figure out how we consolidate.”

With fewer customer-facing touchpoints, Wells will need to program systems to parse out the information where it needs to go, Fleming said. Wells Fargo is also exploring different ways to put customer data into the hands of customers so they can self-service for common requests.

For example, on the treasury management side, businesses may require additional accounts as they acquire new entities. Oftentimes, the existing account holder wants to replicate their existing services, which would require the same process as onboarding a completely new customer, Fleming said The bank is looking to self-service tools to allow customers to request the account duplication, and use automation to speed the delivery of those requests to complete, ideally overnight.

The challenge is figuring out a way to visually represent the data, and to do so without leaning on the internal bank vernacular, Fleming said, noting that task is more difficult than actually pulling the data itself together. The bank is taking an iterative approach with the pilot and will tweak the processes based on customer feedback, she added, noting that the bank is still in the design stage of the project.

“There’s a lot of different processes involved and the way I like to describe it is, even though we might be a swan floating on top of the pond, we’re kicking our feet pretty rapidly,” Fleming said. “But we want to seem as elegant as a swan does.”

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